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University of Illinois Taps Progress Software for Enterprise Messaging

By Dian Schaffhauser

02/13/08

As part of its five-year, $200 million Banner enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, the University of Illinois said it will deploy Progress SonicMQ to handle enterprise messaging. SonicMQ acts as middleware for transaction messages.

The ERP installation affects about 130 software systems within the school, including student enrollment and records, human resources, finance, financial aid, and accounts receivable. The middleware enables those distributed applications to communicate with each other, a vital aspect of service oriented architecture.

The university said managing the flow of information among the disparate applications will be made easier with the messaging system.

"We chose SonicMQ because of its ability to handle the requirements that go with such an enormous enterprise messaging initiative," said Amin Kassem, the school's manager, Administrative Information Technology Services, in a recent statement. "We now have a consistent and reliable messaging architecture that ensures all enterprise information will fall into the correct place for all our student-facing applications, such as the Global Campus and online enrollment system and our back-end employee applications."

The University of Illinois, with 69,000 students and 24,000 employees, has three campuses, in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago, and Springfield as well as a virtual campus for distance learning.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at dian@dischaffhauser.com or on Twitter @schaffhauser.